Scottish Sceptic

There seems to be something in the air with climate. First the Australian government layed off 350 self-styled “scientists”, now the Guardian is doing the same for so called “Journalists” (and other staff).
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving paper. Their vile hatred against everyone else for using fossil fuels as they squandered the earnings from AutoTrader showed a scientifically illiterate newspapers with no moral compass and no financial sense.
My only regret with the job losses, is that this bandaid fix will enable the paper to keep going just that much longer before it eats through its fossil fuel earnings and closes its doors.

For a while I’ve been saying that the internet has fundamentally changed the behaviour of society. In the UK, it has led to the arrival of UK, the Greens and in Scotland the massive and unexpected support for the “non-mainstream” party of the SNP.That revolution is still to be felt in the US – where I predicted that a “third party” would enter politics. But from comments about Trump, I’m beginning to wonder weather Trump is that “third party” – and that far from being an “also ran” as UKIP and the greens in the UK, he may actually be in power.

But first, I need to recap and (in some areas) elaborate on how changes in communication technology directly cause political revolutions .

Writing

For obvious reasons as history starts with writing (history is the period for written records) – we don’t know how writing changed society. But we do know society after writing was one in which written knowledge was hugely expensive – usually taking months, of even years to produce just one books – so things like books could only be afforded by the very largest institutions like Church and State. But even so, the transference of knowledge was very slow typically taking decades or even centuries to migrate between countries let alone continents.

Printing

Printing itself was not so much a technological revolution, as an economic revolution making the cost of creating books and thus storing knowledge vastly cheaper than before. As such we start seeing things like books (e.g. Shakespeare) and Newspapers but most importantly of all – we start seeing key books like the Bible being held by (prosperous) individuals and not just Church & State.

And so, as control of knowledge, left the Church/State and went toward prosperous individuals and their associations, we see that power in society followed and from the 16th century onwards we see a series of revolutions in Europe, whereby the once powerful church/state is replaced with power  based on associations of the richer individuals of society.

So, we can attribute the following directly to printing:

• The division of Catholic church and the rise of protestants (who were led by the PRINTED “book” and not the authority of the pope.
• The beheading of Charles I in Britain
• Leading to the French Revolution, etc, etc.

Continue reading →

I sent a Letter to the head poncho in Scotland explaining how Scotland would be particularly susceptible to the rapid onset global cooling that has occurred numerous times around 10,000 years after the end of the ice age.
As you can see, the letter I received made no mention of the massive cooling effects – indeed “cooling” is not even mentioned, so I doubt they even read the email. Instead it is a bullshitting reply about the totally separate and even by their own figures insignificant and currently not happening warming from CO2.
In other words, a factually wrong, copy and paste response from someone who is so clueless of the subject they wouldn’t know the difference between global cooling and a doughnut.
I have asked for someone who actually understands the subject to reply to my original letter
Our ref: 2016/0006508
16 March 2016
Dear Mr Haseler
Thank you for your correspondence of 18 February to the First Minister regarding climate
change. I have been asked to reply. The Scottish Government’s approach to climate change is based on the best available evidence used in the international decision making process, and the evidence is clear that the global climate is changing. Long-term trends continue to indicate global temperatures are increasing and the World Meteorological Organization advised in January that 2015 was the hottest year on record, with the years 2011-2015 the warmest five year period on record. The causes of climate change are set out clearly in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which states that greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities are extremely likely [95-100% probability] to have been the dominant cause of observed warming since the 1950s, and that warming will continue in the absence of significant emission reductions. The Report considers the role of solar activity and finds that changes made only a small contribution to the net radiative forcing throughout the last century, and that there is high confidence that 21st century solar forcing will have a much smaller impact than the projected increased forcing due to greenhouse gases. Based on the strong scientific evidence of human-induced climate change driven by emissions of greenhouse gases, the international community is taking action through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The recent international climate  change summit in Paris in December 2015 resulted in the first legally binding global agreement on climate change which calls for a global peaking of emissions as soon as possible, with rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with the best available science. The Scottish Government is committed to playing its part in global efforts to tackle climate change, and to meeting the ambitious targets to reduce Scotland’s emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 42% by 2020, and 80% by 2050, set through the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. I hope this is helpful in assuring you that the Scottish Government is committed to playing a leading role in international efforts to tackle climate change, based on the widely accepted
science used in the international decision making process. Yours sincerely, OLIVER ARCHER

Thanks everyone who answered the quiz “Do you understand the greenhouse effect?”
The initial result showing the distribution of scores for the 35 people who have completed the test is above. To give an idea of what results mean, the average is 25 and coincidence the PhD physicist (who doesn’t usually follow climate) who I asked to complete the test got 25.
What is interesting is the skew to the distribution.  This suggests that there’s a fundamental difference between the few who are getting in the 40s and bulk of the responses which are below 30. But given the low number, it could just be a statistical aberration.
For info, the grading was set as follows:
 

(Note: the original average was lower and it has now increased now that some questions are better worded).

Obviously I’ve been far too hard with the previous quiz (Do you understand the Greenhouse effect?). So to compensate, I’ve created one that doesn’t require any expert knowledge:
[WATU 3]

There’s also a fun quiz about well known sceptics & similar subjects here: Quiz: Just for fun

[WATU 2]